Philosophy 4

We all are acquainted with people who think they know far more about important things than they really do. But what if we are such people? How do we know whether our beliefs are really knowledge, or just an accumulation of superstition and half-truths inherited from parents, culture, peer-groups and the like? Philosophers have taken such self-questioning to extremes. Do I know that there is an external world? That I really exist? That the world wasn’t created five years, or five minutes, ago, with lots of misleading evidence about being older? We will look at the structure of knowledge, doubts philosophers have had about it, and helpful positive accounts of its nature that have emerged.